Yesterday I thought of a catchy title

It's gone now

Yesterday was a farm day. I helped load 100 bales on the trailer. Loading 100 bales is much easier than loading 180, not just because it’s fewer bales but because you don’t have to stack them as high. Also, not being so nervous about whether I could lift them, I used my spare brain cells to count the rows on the trailer. A row as I count it is one bale deep (long ways, so two bales deep side ways) and two-and-a-half bales wide (long ways), so five bales to a layer and four layers deep makes twenty bales. So 100 bales is five of these twenty-bale stacks. Another bonus of a 100-bale load is that you only need two tie-down straps instead of eight.

After the load but before lunch L just barely got started fixing the old tedder. My hesitation about fixing the tedder wasn’t the actual work to fix it — although judging by the first two steps, which were to take a punch to knock out a couple rusty pins, my hammer strength wouldn’t have been up to snuff — it was seeing just how badly it broke without my noticing.

Here’s a head from the intact side of the tedder: Note the circular plate, the plates (fingers?) that hold the tedder teeth.

And here’s the one that busted on me. What happened that was inevitable is that the bearing which the head spins on gave out, which made it flop all over and get hit by the other heads — but what I do not know is whether the other damage happened at the same time or during the unknown minutes I continued tedding in this condition. Observe two missing fingers and the hole in the circular plate and a notable lack of any teeth:

For lunch, we went out for E’s uncle’s birthday. It was fun to hear him get phone calls throughout the morning with well-wishes.

And in the afternoon we delivered the hay. I got to see a hay loft — later E told me that this is one of the easier lofts. L stood on the trailer and sent the hay up to us on a conveyer, and then I and the barn help made three-bale stacks and pushed them across the plywood floor to make rows of stacks down the two sides of the loft. It was hot, but not nearly as bad as I thought it might be. E says there are other lofts where you really have to stack and pack the bales in, and those can get really hot and uncomfortable. I guess we’ll find out.

On my way home I picked up a textbook from the library — the Program Management Body of Knowledge, 5th Edition. It’s about as fun as it sounds but I’ve decided to look for employment in technical project coordination and it feels like a good idea to know the lingo. The Program Management Body of Knowledge, more affectionately (?) known as PMBOK, is actually on its 7th edition which is supposed to include more Agile principles, but the library had the 5th edition and so here we are. I think it will be good to read the old version before the new version.

Today I am headed back to the DMV to try to find some rivets (tell more later if this is fruitful), going to try my watercolors this morning, getting new tires put on E’s car around lunchtime, and then going to help with one more load of hay this afternoon. It’s supposed to get up to a proper 90* today, so wish me luck.